Sivantos

Overnight In-House Bank

Sivantos Group is one of the world’s top manufacturers of hearing aids and serves customers in more than 120 countries worldwide, in many of them as market leader. The company was spun off from Siemens Audiology Solutions after Siemens AG sold the company to EQT VI and Santo Holding GmbH in 2015. With more than three million hearing aids sold every year, Sivantos Group generated a revenue of € 835 million in the fiscal year of 2014/15. They employ around 5,000 people in more than 25 countries.
Sivantos aims to become the market leader in the coming years with its brands Signia, Siemens, Audio Service, Rexton, A&M, HearUSA and audibene.

The Challenge

When Sivantos Group was spun off from Siemens, the treasury team had only a 6-week period to become a stand-alone treasury department. The main challenge was to completely migrate payments and to exit any Siemens cash pools in this constrained timeframe, getting all treasury functionalities up and running. All of the around 40 subsidiaries of the group with their respective bank accounts needed to access the system to provide their data in real time. Effective Risk management was also an important objective for Sivantos, especially considering today’s volatile FX markets and the amount of FX-related transactions the company processes every day.

The Solution: Lifesaver BELLIN SWIFT Service

Sivantos’ Global Treasury team had been using the BELLIN system very comprehensively for some time, including cash management and cash balances, FX risk management, hedging, the execution of deals and confirmation matching, guarantee management and also multilateral netting. Following the spin-off, their “lifesaver” for payments was the BELLIN SWIFT Service enabling bank communication through one channel. Sivantos received their own BIC in August 2014, allowing them to get all bank account statements into the system. From day one of being a stand-alone company Sivantos was able to process payments, including the large amount of FX-related payments or disposition transfers via MT101 files using the BELLIN SWIFT Service. Company cash flows are now streamlined – boosting groupwide global cash visibility and enabling detailed cash forecasts on a daily basis, both groupwide and for every entity. This helps the central treasury to make sure that they have the right amount of cash, in the right currency, at the right time, in the right place. In addition, Sivantos set up a risk management workflow that enables very efficient and straightforward hedging thanks to straight-through processing for electronic trading: settlement, confirmation matching and posting of the market value deals to the accounting side is done with only a few clicks in the system.